Math 021 is a general education course meaning lots of students, with varying abilities, in lots of course sections. James Sellers, Department Head, would like all sections of Math 021 to have their quizzes in ANGEL and to have the students take their quizzes at the Pollock Testing Center. The purpose of this is to enable Math 021 to function as a mastery course, students can take the quizzes at their own pace and finish up the course as early as they can. This would free up the instructors to focus on the students who truly need their assistance along the way. Additionally, having the tests online meant that class and practicum time traditionally taken up by in-class quizzes was now available for teaching and personal support.
The goal for the fall semester was to pilot this process in four course sections, each with approximately 50 students. In Math 021 there are 12 quizzes (10 questions each) and the students can take each quiz up to three times. The original plan called for the quizzes to have unique start and end dates. The students could take the quiz u to three times within this window. If they demonstrated mastery by scoring an 80% or above the quiz would lock and a new one would become available. If they failed to achieve mastery they would be directed to make an appointment with the instructor. If they did not take the quiz in the allotted time they would get a score of zero and the next quiz would open. Students would schedule appointments to take a quiz using Pollock's online calendar. James also wanted to include a pretest survey prior to the semester and an exit survey after the last quiz.
Stan Smith, Associate Professor, Math 021, built the quizzes in Diploma, an online Math textbook tool, and published them in an ANGEL Master Course. From there they were copied into the four sections. I created the master course and assisted stan with quiz training and setup.
We ran into issues due to limitations within ANGEL and with the testing center protocol. Using the Action Editor ANGEL could hide/release quizzes based on student mastery. However, ANGEL could not hide/release quizzes based on 3 unsuccessful attempts. Nor could it release a new quiz after the current quiz time window expired. This occurred because our Action Editor has limited functionality because we need to disable the Automate tab due to load issues. The solution was to manually set the start and end dates and to manually review the quiz results to see which students did not achieve mastery.
There was an additional complication regarding scheduling the testing center. Because of demand a set number of seats in Pollock had to be dedicated to Math 021. Also, when the scheduling system was set up it did not take mastery quizzing, or multiple attempts at one quiz into account. As a result, we needed to create 3 unique instances of each quiz in order for the students to schedule a time. Stan would generate a list based on the Item analysis in ANGEL and Will Kerr, manager, Pollock, would set the students parameters so they could schedule appropriately.
Also, rather than the ANGEL Gradebook recording the student's best quiz score, the original parameter, Stan wanted it to record a 1 if the student mastered the quiz and a zero if the student did not master it. This is not possible with the current ANGEL settings. Again, we would need the agents available in the automate tab. The solutin was to keep recording the scores.
We were able to achieve the original goal of have the students take all their quizzes in Pollock.
The pilot will run again this spring. The quiz settings are established and workarounds put in place for any limitations within ANGEL. AIS and Pollock are working together to recode the communication process between ANGEL and the testing center so that student permissions no longer have to be manually set. The goal is to have this in place after the ANGEL upgrade at the end of the spring semester.
The goal for the fall semester was to pilot this process in four course sections, each with approximately 50 students. In Math 021 there are 12 quizzes (10 questions each) and the students can take each quiz up to three times. The original plan called for the quizzes to have unique start and end dates. The students could take the quiz u to three times within this window. If they demonstrated mastery by scoring an 80% or above the quiz would lock and a new one would become available. If they failed to achieve mastery they would be directed to make an appointment with the instructor. If they did not take the quiz in the allotted time they would get a score of zero and the next quiz would open. Students would schedule appointments to take a quiz using Pollock's online calendar. James also wanted to include a pretest survey prior to the semester and an exit survey after the last quiz.
Stan Smith, Associate Professor, Math 021, built the quizzes in Diploma, an online Math textbook tool, and published them in an ANGEL Master Course. From there they were copied into the four sections. I created the master course and assisted stan with quiz training and setup.
We ran into issues due to limitations within ANGEL and with the testing center protocol. Using the Action Editor ANGEL could hide/release quizzes based on student mastery. However, ANGEL could not hide/release quizzes based on 3 unsuccessful attempts. Nor could it release a new quiz after the current quiz time window expired. This occurred because our Action Editor has limited functionality because we need to disable the Automate tab due to load issues. The solution was to manually set the start and end dates and to manually review the quiz results to see which students did not achieve mastery.
There was an additional complication regarding scheduling the testing center. Because of demand a set number of seats in Pollock had to be dedicated to Math 021. Also, when the scheduling system was set up it did not take mastery quizzing, or multiple attempts at one quiz into account. As a result, we needed to create 3 unique instances of each quiz in order for the students to schedule a time. Stan would generate a list based on the Item analysis in ANGEL and Will Kerr, manager, Pollock, would set the students parameters so they could schedule appropriately.
Also, rather than the ANGEL Gradebook recording the student's best quiz score, the original parameter, Stan wanted it to record a 1 if the student mastered the quiz and a zero if the student did not master it. This is not possible with the current ANGEL settings. Again, we would need the agents available in the automate tab. The solutin was to keep recording the scores.
We were able to achieve the original goal of have the students take all their quizzes in Pollock.
The pilot will run again this spring. The quiz settings are established and workarounds put in place for any limitations within ANGEL. AIS and Pollock are working together to recode the communication process between ANGEL and the testing center so that student permissions no longer have to be manually set. The goal is to have this in place after the ANGEL upgrade at the end of the spring semester.
It's much easier to see where we stand, where we are going, and what we've learned with a summary like this.
We need to see the assessment results from VQW, including the academic performance of students in these sections vs. the other sections in the fall -- or even the numbers from last fall.
THis is great work that leverages the strength of being ITS.